『Sugarlands Soundwalk』のカバーアート

Sugarlands Soundwalk

Sugarlands Soundwalk

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.comThe Sugarlands take their name from the sugar maple trees on these slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains. Writer Horace Kephart described the area this way in 1919 letter:I have just returned from a man-hunt in the Sugarlands of Sevier County, Tennessee. The Sugarland Mountain runs northwest from the Smokies between Clingman’s Dome and Mount Le Conte. On its southwestern side is the great gulf that I call “Godforsaken” in Our Southern Highlanders. On the northerly side, which is drained by the headwaters of the Little Pigeon River, is a similar descent, though into a narrower basin, or rather a gorge, exceedingly steep and rocky, gloomy with immense trees that crowd each other, and choked with laurel and other underbrush, fairly impenetrable except where the one lone trail leads down along a brawling torrent. These two basins, and the mountain dividing them, collectively go by the name of Sugarlands.Today, “Sugarlands” is most well known as the busiest gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park; home to a visitors center and the park headquarters just a few miles up the road from Gatlinburg, TN, a Mecca of the Appalachian souvenir economy. While Kephart described the Sugarlands in dark and mysterious tones as a “moonshiners’ paradise” in 1919, within a decade the people who lived there were largely bought out and cleared away for the park. Gatlinburg today sells legally distilled “moonshine” in mason jars to the park’s visitors, and the hills above town are dotted with a few preserved cabins and a mill buildings harkening back to that brief era.The parkway running through the Sugarlands Valley is routinely congested throughout the summer and on weekends. Vehicles crawl along, sounding to the stationary observer like a scanning radio dial; broadcasts of varying energy waft from car windows with a subtle doppler effect as they move along at a kiddie ride pace. About 15 miles to the northeast as the crow flies lies Locust Ridge, the childhood home to Dolly Parton, who remembers the area in a hushed soft focus:In my Tennessee mountain homeLife is as peaceful as a baby's sighIn my Tennessee mountain homeCrickets sing in the fields near byThese fables of Appalachia persist today, exerting influence on broader American culture. Both the peaceful childhood and mountain moonshiner narratives may serve as precursors for some of the identity politics that have played out in the last decade. A nostalgia for a simpler time might contribute to a sincere longing to Make America Great Again for example. Behind the appeal of the moonshiner flouting the law for a cause he considers justified is a logic that leads people to accept actions they’d otherwise question.As it turns out, Dolly Parton’s peaceful haven doesn’t take much effort to rediscover. You simply need to get out of the car and start walking away from the road. Soon enough the sounds of Sugarlands reveal themselves to you. As in “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” there are crickets, songbirds, and come nightfall, the glow of fireflies.Though the song also recalls, “on a distant hilltop an eagle spreads its wings”, this turns out to almost certainly be a nostalgic invention, or symbolism. While an eagle might have passed overhead occasionally, the Sugarlands were not then or now eagle habitat. More to the point, eagle populations had plummeted in the 50’s in 60’s due to DDT use in pesticides. They were listed as an endangered species in the continental US in the 60’s, and just 417 known nesting pairs were tallied in 1963.It’s unequivocally a better world for eagles today than it was in Parton’s childhood. You might say America is great again, for eagles, thanks to the Endangered Species Act of 1966. There are now over 300,000 bald eagles in the continental US. Meanwhile, the current administration has been systematically rolling back Endangered Species Act protections over the last year. A longing for the past, for a simpler time, a more affordable time, a peaceful time, a time of perceived abundance, is universal. No one political party can lay claim to it, to the exclusion of another. Any good-faith conversation will certainly uncover that when you add it all up, it’s a complicated picture, what is lost and what is gained over time, and why. To keep what we’ve still got it’s going to take cooperation and accountability.One thing I believe—and what keeps me interested in doing this soundwalk work—is that we must strive to nourish our connection to nature; to animals, to plants, to natural systems. If we veer off, disconnected in our hall of mirrors screens, we risk losing sight of our interconnectedness. Ideally this is accomplished firsthand, in the field, whatever that “field” might look like—it needn’t be a national park. But, I’m also receptive to the idea that vicarious exposure—caring about a place you’...
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